Unraveled
by Neko Kuroban
Summary: There was no time for her sorrows. Not yet.


'I love you,' she wanted to say, throwing any kind of caution to the wind.

She was not a careful woman. Anyone who had ever encountered her could attest to that. She had a habit of flinging any and all precautionary measures to the pavement. All the other Aurors who had pulled shifts with her knew that she was not timid when it came to modifying mission objectives to chase after a lead. She was a disturbance in the fabric of the Ministry, the fabric that was knit so tightly that she would come, in the new year, to suspect it could hold water.

She wanted to let him know that she loved him, that she could not easily sleep in his absence. She wanted to tell him that she was worried sometimes, more constant worry than her usual mild concern for the future. She could not stand to be in the dark about anything, whether it concerned her or not, and he was effectively shutting her out.

A year ago, she would not have hesitated to tell him that she loved him. But...back then, she had been brilliant and capable, cheerful and pixie-like, trying out various faces and disguises -- the trickster, the runaway, the teacher, the student, the perky young rebel. She had been bright and full of joy. Now, she was a pale, ghostly shadow of herself and full of care.

Before she never game a damn about what people thought of her. Now, she worried, because they were worried, and it agitated her. Mum looked at her with anxious brown eyes. Dad kept opening his mouth as if to say something, then thinking better of it. Her friends whispered amongst themselves.

A mind healer said that she must have suffered a shock. _No shit_, she had thought. A Muggle psychiatrist told her a sort of chemical imbalance in her brain caused it. He had given her a prescription for some kind of pill -- like she could not solve her own damn problems -- and told her to come back the next month. She had taken exactly one and sent the rest swirling down the kitchen sink in her flat, switching on the disposal as if to get some closure.

Kingsley was slightly more reluctant to send her out on assignments but the division needed all the manpower they could get. Somehow, she had adopted the mask of the quintessential Auror. She showed up early, went home late. She averaged about three or four hours of sleeps, and some nights she did not bother to return to her empty flat, trudging through piles of paperwork in her closet-sized office until her eyelids grew too heavy.

On rare nights off, her mates would drop by, trying to convince her to go out with them. They offered her comforts they knew she could never accept -- she had never touched any kind of drug, save for a spliff or two in the more reckless moments of her restless youth, and she did not want to start. She had an addictive personality -- maybe that was her problem, maybe she felt too intensely.

At least, she used to. She did not feel very much of anything these days. Most of the time it felt as if there was nothing at all inside of her and she lived suspended in an empty void with nothing to hold her, no kind of support. She even fainted during a briefing, but it was not as bad or embarrassing as it could have been. She had been sitting at a the long conference table, slumped into her outstretched arm, then, instantaneously, she was tumbling past a hundred thousand whistling stars to the tune of her own irregular heartbeat.

She sat up slightly, the cotton sheets falling away from her naked sternum to pool at her narrow waist.

"Do you want me to put on the light?" He asked, voice almost painfully tired.

She should have known that was not asleep. "No," she answered, gazing down at him. She reached out to tangle her fingers in his hair. The strands of graying brown were soft against her calloused fingers. If she let her eyes become unfocused _just_ so, she could imagine that the room was upside-down and the ceiling was the floor.

How strange it seemed to have a slowly spinning ceiling fan jutting from the parquet.

When she regained her senses, she looked around, eyes checking for her cat out of pure habit. She felt rather like a fool, when she finally remembered that she had left the pitiful thing in the care of Molly Weasley, who always had kittens running underfoot. Tonks was having a hard enough time keeping track of the last time she had fed herself, let alone a pet. She slid out of bed and crossed to her bureau, pulling out clean clothes and her wand. She tugged a heavily wrinkled shirt over her head, pulled on her jeans.

"I'm going for a run."

"Be careful." A simple, precautionary statement. He could have been talking to a child. Or a stranger.

"Yeah. I know. Constant vigilance."

Running energized some part of her, made her feel alert.

Perhaps too much so. The job made you acquire all varieties of despairing knowledge. She learned a lot before the war, learned of despair. Before Voldemort's re-emergence, she was the Auror assigned to look for what places rented rooms, no questions asked; where a wizard kid could go to trade stolen items from Muggle shops, whether for money or drugs. How to recognize when an innocuous front was something more sinister, when it was a struggle, what implements people -- wizard and Muggle alike -- used to beat their children. It never taught the reasons to the madness; that, like Kingsley said, was something everyone had to learn on his or her own.

Most days it was not hard.

Just enough to break her heart.

Tonks turned into the park, where a bent old man was scolding his graying poodle. He recognized her and waved, looking jubilant. She could not recall his name -- she never knew it, never asked -- but she stopped and made small talk for a few minutes, her movements just a little too animated. She envied his simple, uncomplicated life. Why couldn't hers be like that, just a procession of ordinary delights?

Turning to return home, she stopped at a bakery for bagels, and took her time to examine the selection before getting her usual tea and crumpet. She lingered -- she knew what would await her when she returned.

She was not surprised.

The bed was neatly made, turned up so smoothly it was as if no one had slept there at all. Her tailored Auror robes, previously crumpled on the hardwood floor, sat neatly folded n the bureau surface. A scrap of parchment lay on her pillow: I'm sorry. No signature, but who else could it have been? The hand writing was familiar, wiry and slender, but the hand that wrote it had shaken so badly that the words -- too pathetic, too significant -- were all but indecipherable. She crumpled it in her hand. There was no time for her sorrows, not yet. She had to be at work in less than twenty minutes.

She wondered if there was time for a shower.


End file.
